My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation Hardcover

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My Sister

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A lso by Molly H Askell

From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies

Love and Other Infectious Diseases: A Memoir

Holding My Own in No Man’s Land:

Women and Men and Films and Feminists

Frankly, My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited

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molly h ask ell

My Brother
My Sister

6

Story of a Transformation

vik ing

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[Copyright Page TK]

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[dedication to come]

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Contents

Note to Readers

. ix .

c H A p t e r o n e

My Brother Drops a Bombshell

. 1 .

c H A p t e r t wo

Flesh and Blood

. 13 .

c H A p t e r t H r e e

My Brother Kisses His Elbow

. 33 .

c H A p t e r f o u r

My Brother Advertises for a Secretary and Reels in a Wife

. 47 .

c H A p t e r f i v e

Who Has It Better, Men or Women?

. 59 .

c H A p t e r s i x

My Brother Writes a Story

. 73 .

c H A p t e r s e v e n

A Tale of Two Wives

. 87 .

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Contents

cH A pt er eigHt

The Sculptor of Human Faces

. 101 .

cH A pt er nine

He Learns to Walk and Talk Like a Dame

. 119 .

cH A pt er ten

Ellen Becomes a Mountain Woman

. 131 .

cH A pt er elev en

Ellen Changes Her Mind, and Changes It Again

. 147 .

cH A pt er tw elv e

Andrew Falls and Ellen Comes Up and Shows Off Her Body

. 161 .

cH A pt er tHirt een

The Year of the Transsexual

. 175 .

cH A pt er fourt een

Ellen Is a Welfare Mudder

. 187 .

cH A pt er fif t een

Looking Backward and Moving Forward

. 199 .

[Acknowledgments]

. 213 .

. viii .

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Note to Readers

I
t is not exactly a spoiler to say that this book got written, though for a while its fate was in doubt. The first thing my brother did was to

swear me to silence, both oral and literary. Somewhere along the way,

the ban was lifted and I began writing; further along came a cease-

and- desist telephone call, and writing was suspended. Eventually,

though, he became she, and a deal was struck. She not only agreed to

it, but participated with generosity and at length. Her words as pre-

sented in this book occurred in conversations between us, either in

person or over the telephone, both before and after the transition.

Once she’d authorized the project, I began recording our conversa-

tions, most of which came after she’d undergone the first surgery, fa-

cial feminization. However, since many of these discussions occurred

in nascent form from the time my sister— then my brother— first told

me of her intentions, I have taken the liberty of presenting them in

their fuller form from the beginning, to aid the reader in experiencing the story as the two of us experienced it. Although neither my brother/

sister’s name nor any details or names from our family have been

changed, the names of his/her first and second wives and a few people

in his/her immediate family have been altered to protect their privacy.

Nevertheless, their words, like my brother/sister’s, are their own, and I have presented each person’s story as faithfully as I could.

. ix .

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c h a p t e r on e

My Brother Drops a Bombshell

I
t’s the sixth of October 2005, a crisp Indian summer day in Manhattan, and we’re sitting in the dining room of our Upper East Side apart-

ment. Outside the window, against the cobalt blue sky, looms the

Church of the Heavenly Rest, where Andrew and I were married,

where my brother, all and handsome in his morning suit, walked me

up the aisle and, in my father’s stead, gave me away. Now, almost forty years later, he’s come alone for a single night, bringing with him a

whiff of unease, even alarm. First it was his wife’s last- minute cancella-tion, and now it’s the formality with which he’s summoned us to the

table . . . like one of those scenes from
Law & Order
, when the detectives have to tell the family a loved one is dead.

Named John Cheves Haskell Jr., after our father, he’s always been

known in the family as Chevey (pronounced “Chivvy” as in “chin”). In

addition to being the only immediate family we have (Andrew and I

had no children, and Andrew’s brother died in a sky- diving accident

when he was twenty- eight), Chevey is the one we turn to for help in so many ways— all those areas in which we are inept. From the humbly

domestic (What temperature should the refrigerator be? Chevey trav-

els with a special thermometer) to the technological to the arcane ways of money and finance (he’s a financial adviser by profession and a rationalist by avocation), my brother is a fixer of problems and a fount of common sense, generous with his time as if there were no end to it. In

recent years, the only time I can remember being vexed with him was

. 1 .

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My Brother
My Sister

in this very dining room. Andrew and I were giving a party that re-

quired removing a leaf of the chrome and glass table. As Chevey and

Eleanor were up visiting, he offered to help remove the panel, but the

heavy glass, detached from its chrome frame, dropped and shattered.

If Andrew had perpetrated this domestic calamity, it would have been

exasperating but unsurprising. At the hands of my hyper- competent

brother, it was almost comically out of character. And now he is about

to shatter normalcy in our dining room again, in a way that I would

have said was out of character if I knew what character was and if

character had anything to do with it.

I’m terrified it’s some fatal illness, possibly ALS (Lou Gehrig’s dis-

ease), the degenerative neurological disorder from which our father

died. Without our ever talking about it, that possibility has been a

constant in our lives. Sensing this, he immediately disposes of it: he’s not dying and he doesn’t have an illness in the ordinary sense.

“I have what’s known as gender dysphoria,” he says. “For as long as

I can remember, I’ve felt I should have been born female. And now I’m

going to become one.”

Stunned silence. Disbelief. How can this be? Chevey, my brother!

Andrew’s brother- in- law! He’s so utterly normal. There’s no sudden

memory, no flash, no “Of course.” He was (and is) a manly guy— no

trace of effeminacy or kid in a tutu— who, if not captain of the football team or a hell- raising, beer- swilling male chauvinist, was always plenty virile, and there were two wives who’d have so attested.

When did he know?

“Since way back, early childhood,” he tells me, “I had confusing

urges, feminine longings, but even in puberty I simply had no concept

for what I was experiencing.”

“You mean, as the expression has it, a female trapped in a male

body?”

. 2 .

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“Nothing as clear as that, but just confused feelings, a desire to

dress and feel like a girl, not very strong at first.”

A desire, it seems, for which neither he nor society had words. His

marriages were good, even sexually, but part of every day was increas-

ingly spent in something like agony, imagining himself a woman.

I’m suddenly struck by two odd memories. In the later years of his

second marriage, he became anorexic. Eleanor and I kept asking, even

nagging, him about it, but he insisted he was doing it to keep his cho-

lesterol down, with his internist’s approval.

“I was trying to change my body shape,” he now admits.

The other image seems even more telling. For as long as I can re-

member, he would pick at the skin at his fingertips, almost like an animal gnawing its own flesh, till his fingers became raw.

“I was trying to get out of my skin,” he says. And now, in effect, he

will.

I think about Eleanor. She has to be devastated. They’ve had what

to all appearances is a wonderful marriage, worked and travelled and

built a life together that is about to splinter at the seams. They’re separating, he tells me, and eventually he will move to a mountain condo

the two of them bought some years ago.

What I want to know— a question almost too painful to ask— is

how she’s dealing with it.

Chevey’s calm voice wavers. “She’s having a hard time. I think she’s

struggling less with the idea of me being transsexual than about losing the marriage. A year and a half before we got married, I told her I had had this problem but I thought I had it under control.”

“Why now, at this late date?”

“Because,” he explains, “the urge gets stronger, not weaker. You

just don’t want to go to your grave in what you believe is the wrong

body.”

. 3 .

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My Sister

I ask him if he ever thought of doing it earlier, if it was the reason

he and Beth, his first wife, got divorced. He separated from Beth in

1976. We were all mystified, so joined at the hip were the two. They’d

been together since puberty, had dated other people but always come

back together.

“Yes, I took hormones,” he says. “I was going to change.” He

bought a charming Tudor house in Richmond’s West End and had it

rezoned so that it could serve as financial management consultancy

below and residence above.

And then he realized he couldn’t do it. Pete, his son with Beth, was

still alive, Mother was alive, the doctors he went to presented a confusing picture; there was no Internet, no information, no guidance.

“I didn’t anticipate the intensity of the drive. Nobody can imagine

it. To the point that not having the sex change is no longer an option.

From the outside it looks like a selfish act, but from the inside not at all. I had a ‘happy’ life before, and I’m destroying it all. It’s nothing to do with happiness. I had happiness in all those normal senses.

“It’s like . . .” He pauses. “Well, imagine you’re a paraplegic, and

they tell you they can give you movement in your legs, but you’ll have to use a cane. Of course you’d jump at the opportunity. I’ll go further,” he continues. “I’d rather die in surgery trying to become a woman than

live the rest of my life fighting it. The only way I wouldn’t go through with the surgery is if there were a 100 percent chance of death.”

Spoken in his calm, determined voice, rational to the end, this is so

chilling it takes my breath away.

He lays out the plan in his methodical way, precise and logical— the

very qualities I love about him and depend on, but that are at odds

with the tumultuous event about to unfold and the inner turmoil to

which it bears witness. In May he’ll have facial reconstruction surgery

. 4 .

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My Brother Drops a Bombshell

in California, and then move to Pine Mountain to begin a year of “pre-

senting” as a woman. (As a semiretired investment adviser who over-

sees the financial affairs of his several clients, he can continue to work at home.) There is, it turns out, a whole protocol for sexual reassignment, safeguards to protect against the disasters of the early years. Often men became women, and women men, expecting miracles, and